tortuous \TOR-choo-us\, adjective: marked by repeated turns and bends

I seem to have lost quite a bit of gusto since the last time I updated this page.
Today was rather awful as my list of items lost to the city is steadily growing larger (and more expensive).

This is quite out of character. I am generally an organized person and I hardly ever lose anything..

To recap, the city has consumed the following possessions as of 7/19/07:
*new camera ~$400
*2gb flash drive ~$30
*unlimited 30 day Metrocard ~$76

The most recent of which being the metrocard, which is pretty unfortunate. The museum pays me back for transportation costs, but not for card falling out of pocket costs. There is a balance protection service offered by MTA but it is equal to $2.53/day for the rest of the time the 30 day card was to be active. So I'm out for at least half of my subway rides, if not more, because rides are 2 bucks a pop and I tend to ride the subway 2-4 times a day. I've written a letter begging for sympathy in purchasing a new unlimited pass, but somehow I doubt it will be given the time of day.

The end of my time here is looming in the not so distant future (T minus two weeks) and I'm starting to get pretty nervous. I don't have any results per se... Just a lot of unanalyzed data. Today I acquired two high school students to help me with the really tedious parts of my research which is amazing. I was looking some very sleepless nights in the face until that happened. It was a really fun experience to sit there and teach them what I know about meteorites because I didn't think it was much until that happened. It made me feel smart. Denton turned down another request to examine somebody's "meteorwrong" (some sort of strange rock someone picked up and thinks is a meteorite but never is). He looked at me and said "Well I should have just sent you down there to examine it!" and he wasn't joking. Hah.

I've got to churn out a draft of my paper by tomorrow but I just can't get myself started. I have never really written a paper like this before and I'm pretty intimidated. I shouldn't be, but I can't help it. We're planning to submit it to the journal Meteoritics and maybe one other journal, not sure yet. I'm going to be the author on the paper which is pretty scary as my job in this project is to refute Hap McSween's 1977 paper. He did pretty much the same thing I am doing now and it has not been touched since even though technology has progressed leaps and bounds since then. He is pretty much one of the big dogs in meteoritics land.

Needless to say it is going to be a long night.



Good night,

Chelsea